A revolutionary shift in the way market monitoring is done

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BuzzTalk ClientByelex B.V.

TechnologyJAVA, Oracle, GlassFish, PostGreSQL,

FusionCharts

Delivery2010 - 2011

Facing today’s marketing challenge

Today’s marketing challenge is to improve ROI by

saving investments and increasing return. Marketing

professionals are using advanced market research and a

rapidly increasing range of support systems for enhanced

budgeting, planning, and decision making. Meanwhile

Social Media are proliferating, and massive data flows are

containing huge amounts of valuable, yet under-utilized

marketing data. The launch of BuzzTalk1 might change

this quite rapidly.

BuzzTalk gives unprecedented access to unstructured,

textual data, providing new market information to support

decision making. BuzzTalk offers a revolutionary shift in the

way market monitoring and analysis is done, enabling new

ways to facing today’s marketing challenge.

1  https://buzztalk.nl/

Technology used in this application

A Compelling Perspective

Marketing management support functions

According to Asur and Huberman2 social media content

can be used to predict real-world outcomes. In particular,

they use the chatter from Twitter.com to forecast box-office

revenues for movies. A simple model built from the rate

at which tweets are created about particular topics can

outperform market-based predictors. And sentiments

extracted from Twitter can be utilized to further improve the

forecasting power of social media.

BuzzTalk is perfectly suited for monitoring and analyzing

tweets, blogs and news sites, and for picking, choosing,

enhancing and presenting relevant information. For

example it will easily:

•  Identify new trends;

•  Detect hypes and spikes;

•  Monitor and analyse the reputations of people,

companies and brands.

It will do so in minutes.

What it does

“Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next”

said Jonas Salk, discoverer of the polio vaccine. From

this perspective BuzzTalk not only will tell the marketing

professional where to look next, it subsequently also

supports her in doing so.

2  Sitaram Asur, Bernardo A. Huberman (2010) Predicting the Future with 

Social Media, http://arxiv.org/abs/1003.5699v1

Spike detection

How it works

BuzzTalk can generate reports that are based on a whole

spectrum of user defined searches. These reports provide

information and analyses of the online publications and

social communications on the Internet about the specified

search topics.

BuzzTalk  is  currently  mining  16,000  feeds  worldwide, 

mainly  in  the  United  States  (over  7,000  feeds),  The 

Netherlands (5,000 feeds), United Kingdom (1,000 feeds), 

Belgium (700 feeds), and Canada (500 feeds).

Byelex Showcase

A revolutionary shift in the way market monitoring is done

BuzzTalk

This engine searches the article for facts within 36 groups 

such  as:  Industry  Term, Organization, Company, Market 

Index, Person, Country, Region, City, Political Event, Sports 

Event,  Technology,  Operating  System,  Programming 

Language,  Published  Medium,  Medical  Treatment,  and 

Music Album. It tags those facts and returns the results.

Each  document  is  cleaned  and  translated  into  English. 

Then the sentiment is determined through OpenDover, the

most powerful sentiment analysis tool currently available.

If possible the subject domain is also detected. Currently 

OpenDover  supports  26  domains  including:  Politics, 

Disaster, Ecology, Economics, Finance, Business, Health, 

and a range of products, including Health Insurance,

Medical  Care,  Pharmaceuticals,  Food,  Beverage,  Audio 

Players, Cars, Computers, Phones and Software.

After an article has been sentiment tagged it is sent to

OpenCalais,  the  largest  fact  tagging engine on  the web. 

BuzzTalk then generates reports such as:

•  Overall buzz within reported period for the selected

search term(s): with a breakdown of the total number 

of documents into Positive, Negative, and Neutral.

•  Tag analysis: BuzzTalk reports in which tag groups the 

selected search term is most frequently mentioned.

The  top  3  of  these  groups  are  broken  down  to  the 

most frequently used tags within the group.

•  Top 25 most active sources  for  the selected search 

term(s).

Influencers dynamic top 50

BuzzTalk technology

Three types of data sources

BuzzTalk  collects  all  text  documents  from  16,000  of  the 

most active websites around the globe, 2/3 are news sites 

and 1/3 are blog sites. The authors of these documents are 

mainly journalists and opinion leaders respectively. The

total number of monitored websites will grow to 43,000 in 

the near future. These data sources are complemented by

Twitter, through which consumers express their opinions.

Opinion mining and sentiment analysis

BuzzTalk applies a division of opinion words into ordered

categories, expressing:

•  a  Personal  emotional  state:  happy,  delighted,  sad, 

angry;

•  Appreciation: flexible, efficient, stable, ideal, highest;

•  Judgement: active, decisive, caring, intelligent. 

This division is one of BuzzTalk’s cornerstones for opinion

mining and sentiment analysis.

Byelex Showcase

A revolutionary shift in the way market monitoring is done

BuzzTalk

OpenDover

BuzzTalk contains a unique combination of OpenDover3

(the  best  Sentiment  Tagging  Engine)  and  OpenCalais4

(the best Fact Tagging Engine). 

OpenDover is a sophisticated web service that allows

the professional to extract semantic features within

blogs, content management systems, websites, tweets or

applications.

OpenDover uses semantic technologies for sentiment

tagging texts, including:

•  A unique knowledge base of opinion words, domain-

related words and intensifiers extracted from hundreds

of thousands of opinion-related texts;

•  Diverse  expressions  of  opinion  words  and  phrases: 

adjectives, nouns, verbs (both explicit and implicit); 

•  Automatic recognition of context dependent and

context independent opinion words.

OpenCalais

Calais is a rapidly growing toolkit of capabilities powered by 

Thomson Reuters. It allows BuzzTalk to readily incorporate

state-of-the-art semantic functionality within blogs, content

management systems, websites or applications.

The  OpenCalais  Web  Service  automatically  creates 

rich semantic information about the content BuzzTalk

submits – in well under a second. Using natural language

processing, machine  learning and other methods, Calais 

analyzes a document and finds the entities within it. But,

Calais  goes well  beyond  classic  entity  identification  and 

returns the facts and events hidden within the text as well.

The tags are delivered to BuzzTalk, which then incorporates

them into its analyses and reports.

3  http://opendover.nl/

4  http://www.opencalais.com/

Language independent

Information enhancement and decision

support - conclusions

Information enhancement involves taking data in their

raw form, removing as much noise and redundancy as

possible, and bringing out a core that’s ready for further

processing. This basic function of BuzzTalk, performed

on facts, opinions and sentiment, makes it particularly

suited for supporting the marketing function. For, next to

facts and figures, opinions and sentiment in the market are

of vital importance for decision making by the marketing

professional - at the strategic, tactical and operational

levels.

Byelex Showcase

A revolutionary shift in the way market monitoring is done

BuzzTalk

www.byelex.com www.internetunlimited.nl www.picopoint.comT: +31 (0)165 - 33 22 44        T: +31 (0)165 - 33 22 44      T: +31 (0)165 - 33 22 46F: +31 (0)165 - 33 22 49        F: +31 (0)165 - 33 22 49      F: +31 (0)165 - 33 22 49

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Contact information

Other areas where this is true include:

•  Politics (policy making, campaigning, debating);

•  Financial  services:  banking  (risk  management),  fund 

management (pension, trust funds, hedge funds).

Behavioural economics tells us that emotions can

profoundly affect individual behaviour and decision-

making. Recent research results indicate that the accuracy

of Dow Jones Industrial Average index predictions can be

significantly improved by the inclusion of specific public

mood dimensions5 . We are currently investigating what role 

BuzzTalk should play in this respect.

BuzzTalk could also add a new dimension to news services

by providing:

•  Journalists with supporting evidence for interpretation;

•  Editors with identification and in-depth analyses of the 

key issues in current affairs;

•  Both with finding hot areas of interest at an early stage.

Our conclusion:

BuzzTalk has the potential of rapidly becoming a valuable

tool for decision makers and professionals in a wide range

of industries, providing them with an advantage over

competition.

5  Johan Bollen, Huina Mao, Xiao-Jun Zeng (2010) Twitter mood predicts the 

stock market, http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.3003v1

Stock exchange information